Misconceived Green Movements

The debate on global warming occupies the top spot in environmental priorities. But this debate has some familiar earmarks: It began in the scientific community and bled into wider society until economics politicized it; its predictions are given with drastic hard-to-follow statistics and doomsday imagery; and dissenting voices are labeled nutjobs.

In fact, without taking sides in the current debate, it is easy to see that the way in which global warming is presented looks and sounds very similar to green movements of the past, including ones that failed to live up to predictions because, for example, the threat was overestimated or the solution proved worse than the problem.

The following presents five such misconceived green movements, each of which emerged from honorable intentions, but wound up causing more damage — either to the environment, to the movement itself or to us humans — than it aimed to resolve.

DDT

In the 1930s, the synthetic pesticide DDT was so highly regarded as a way to prevent the spread of diseases like malaria and typhus that the discoverer of this misconceived green movement was awarded the Nobel Prize. In countries like Sri Lanka, DDT reduced malaria drastically from 60,000 cases per year to as few as 17.

Then, in 1962, Rachel Carson wrote the seminal environmental book Silent Spring. In it, she warned that DDT may cause cancer in humans and that it poses a serious wildlife threat. Although she never called for a ban (in fact, she advocated its very limited use), 10 years later, the U.S. banned DDT outright despite the lack of convincing clinical data, and much of the world followed. Experts believed species like the bald eagle made a comeback as a direct result of the ban.

Malaria’s comeback, however, has been more impressive. This is particularly so in Third World regions whose governments can’t afford to risk incurring the wrath of countries like the U.S. by using DDT to contain malaria, yet who have not been provided with any other viable solution.

Basing their conclusion on studies involving mice and rats, in 1987, the Environmental Protection Agency could do no better than to say that DDT was a “probable carcinogen,” a statement they tempered by declaring the “existing epidemiological data… inadequate.”

Hydrogen cars

Cars of the future, powered by alternative fuels like methanol or algae, or via electricity, hydrogen, air or solar power, all share basic goals: That the car’s overall performance comes very close to that of today’s gasoline cars without emitting carbon dioxide. It’s a lofty goal, and in some cases, it’s very attainable.

President Bush got the nation excited about hydrogen in his 2003 State of the Union address. The future hydrogen car will be powered in one of two ways: Either by hydrogen combustion (which doesn’t differ much from current cars) or by electrochemical conversion in a so-called fuel cell. The fuel cell is vastly preferred, but it has its own problems. Costs are currently excessive, and hydrogen as an on-board fuel creates a serious flammability risk.

But the biggest hurdle that makes this a misconceived green movement is that the hydrogen used in the car has to be produced, and the only place to do this is at an energy plant, which requires burning the very fossil fuels we’re trying to avoid.

Fish farming

In the last century, overfishing severely depleted numerous fish populations while the demand for seafood went up. A nifty solution to this problem was (and is) called aquaculture; in short, it removes all the uncertainties of fishing, including boats, seasons and fish populations, by raising desirable fish like salmon the same way as cattle and chickens: in the controlled conditions of a farm. For some species, such as mollusks, it’s been an unqualified success. But the same isn’t true for salmon, one of the world’s most popular fish.